Understanding the Joy of Living.
When life has so many challenges, where is the joy in living?
In the last 14 chapters, we have dealt with most of the challenges. The financial challenge was also acknowledged, and it has to be solved. If we exclude the health challenges mentioned in Chapter 13, the remaining challenges are projections of our own reality. It must be emphasized that people around us reinforce that reality on a daily basis. We take annual or biannual vacations to go to a distant place and ‘enjoy’. Is that an attempt to get away from reality? Think about it.
In short, the challenges posed by life are projections. They keep multiplying at such a rapid speed that we feel trapped.
Joy is not an entity to be acquired, nor is it a destination reached at the end of an escape. It is not a positive substance that can be collected through possessions, vacations, or deliberate effort. Joy is simply the baseline state of existence. It remains when we stop projecting, defending, and multiplying these mental fictions.
Health is defined by the absence of major illness. Death is merely the absence of life. Similarly, joy is not a thing in itself. It is the quiet absence of self-manufactured friction. The trap dissolves when the mind ceases to chase projections. It surrenders the need to reinforce a fragile self-image. What remains in that stillness, uncluttered by artificial challenges, is what grammar mistakenly labels joy.
Control versus Living
Humans are not living at all. They are trying to enhance control. They do not have a clue about living, but they have a great penchant for control. Living feels unsafe because it cannot be controlled. Control replaces tasting with ranking, and relating with positioning. The more control increases, the less life is actually felt.
The solution is a withdrawal from control as a way of being. Return authority to direct contact. Reduce commentary. Let events pass without opinion. Replace comparison with calibration. Accept limits deliberately.
Maintain distance from the mind. Live near the body. The mind is where control accumulates: comparison, narration, and regret. The body does not speculate. It registers hunger, taste, and warmth. Control is always mental. Living is always bodily.
Control is a serious game.
Play Without the Game
Play is remarkable because joy occurs when the mind gets out of the way. Play any sport, and you will know this directly. Sports occupy the immediate attention. When the mind is fully engaged in the physical present, it cannot cause pain. It cannot recall painful memories or project future anxieties. That temporary absence of the storytelling mind is joy. Cherish it.
Every person has a skill in which they excel, and they can get lost in it. The joy of being lost in action is the real joy. For instance, the joy of painting or writing occurs when the mind and fingers move in tandem. The best we can do is observe the unfolding process without analytical interference.
The moment you lose the calculating mind, joy appears. This is because the mind is the primary friction. It is a capable solver of practical problems, but an eager creator of artificial ones.
This explains the widespread reliance on alcohol and intoxicants. They are blunt, chemical attempts to mute the mind’s background noise. They force focus onto a single channel. This is a crude suppression rather than genuine clarity. If that single remaining channel happens to be depression or hostility, the drinker is doomed. Often those around the drunk are doomed as well.
Killjoy Mind
At 3 o’clock in the morning, the mind woke me to write this section. The paradox is that waking up itself was a killjoy. If this had been written at that hour, it would have broken the routine. It would have disturbed the sleep pattern for days. The temptation was avoided.
This is how the mind works to kill joy. It turns spontaneous writing into a discipline, which then becomes an ambition. With effort put in, expectation is raised. We expect readers to come, starting a new cycle of the game. As clarified in ‘About Me’, this writing is without motivation of any kind, especially for readership or money.
But the mind operates this way. Every sport we pick up becomes a game to beat everyone else. The task of painting becomes a competition with the known or unknown. Sports become a game, and that kills the joy of doing it.
The Illusion of the Path
Can there be an ideal structure for living? Can there be a perfect loop to get into? Can there be “good” habits that guarantee peace?
The short answer is no. As established in Chapter 1, the mind loves loops, and imagination easily masquerades as reality. Any predetermined road you choose to build will instantly construct its own constraints. There can be no fixed method.
Life is simply inching forward dangerously into the unknown. There is no pre-paved way. The mind will keep playing its games; some days you win, and some days the mind wins. The key is not to give up, but to keep watching.
To expect a specific “feeling” of enlightenment is merely to demand another emotion or sensation from the mind. People spend years prostrating before a Guru without progress. They chase one book after another, collecting concepts without understanding. The mind convinces us that these are noble pursuits. It tells us that salvation, enlightenment, and awareness are achievements to be added to our repertoire.
Implicitly, this creates a brand new loop of thought. It launches yet another journey for the ego to embark upon.
Therefore, the true answer is practical engineering. Find your diagram and tools. Fix only as little as possible, as there is nothing to fix.
Just an insight to see what exists.
A warning is needed here about using this analysis of human life. This will be the last discussion in this series. Therefore, the next chapter is about the danger ahead.